Nottingham’s Tindersticks draw on a broad range of influences (from Nick Drake and Scott Walker to Dusty In Memphis and Barry White) with poignant depth, cinematic sweep and enviable perfectionism. That’s great and all, but doesn’t quite explain what has made the band (active since 1994 and always seemingly on the verge of disappearing) so eccentric and endearing. Tindersticks have always stood out from the attention-deficient British music scene by virtue of their humanism. They echo their heroes’ pop classicism without directly striving for their stylish detachment. Tindersticks aren’t afraid to bleed on their wrinkle-free tuxedoes. Their fragile ballads linger like half-forgotten dreams, deeply romantic yet always tinged with regret. Their lush arrangements are often intentionally awkward and sour, transcending OST utility with a nerve that won’t be ignored. There exists no Tindersticks song with a simple, unclouded theme. No filler, no relief. Emerson Dameron - Dusted Magazine

Morgan PackardSounding both referential and unique at the same time, "Airships Fill The Sky" is an album that I just keep on going back to - and if this isn't enough for our tiny minds to handle, there's another full album in DVD format, 'Unsimulatable' which sees Packard's audio experiments set to equally moving visuals by Joshue Ott. These intricate and somewhat polar-looking meshes of computer generated lines and textures are weirdly alluring and should have you in a James Woods-style state in no time - trust me. Packard has created a truly captivating album here which we're totally passionate about, we implore you to investigate, it's one of the year's finest. Essential purchase. Boomkat

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy returns with a brand new album - not a covers album (like the recent Ask Forgiveness) and not a sketched collection of demos (like the even more recent Wai Notes), but a proper studio-recorded follow-up to 2006's The Letting Go. Musically, Lie Down In The Light is a lot less flashy and polished than its Valgeir Sigurdsson-produced predecessor, dropping the string sections and carefully sculpted electronic elements in favour of a more traditional country sound, the most recent precedent for which would be Master & Everyone. Overall you'd have to view this newie as a generally more upbeat affair than that 2003 LP, but both albums benefit from the bright, unfussy production of Lambchop's Mark Nevers. Boomkat

One thing's for sure. The Books make their particular brand of musical genius seem perfectly effortless. Their playful yet intricate sound collages on third album 'Lost And Safe' have the feel of a genuinely happy accident. It's as if they couldn't have possibly planned it to be this way, the sounds fell out of the machine just like that. But of course they must have engaged brains. Despite The Books endearingly child-clumsy (yet sophisticated) sound, or cheeky humour (witness the distinctly silly "I am the angel of death" sample on 'If Not Now, Whenever') a set of tuned plastic drain pipes or a vintage clavinet requires at least some forethought, albeit originating from a slightly unusual kind of thinking. playlouder

Last year, in the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and now provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands captured live in their natural habitat.

The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful ‘Takk…’ album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir*, the band reached an entirely new spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth.

Sea Hyun lee paintings are a constant and obsessive shuffling of recurring fragments. His unmistakable series of landscapes are rendered in delicate but pervasive washes of red - large swaths of unmarked white meandering between islands of crimson land. The blank spaces are harshly set against the carefully detailed fragments in red yet cohering into the flawless totality that is created by each painting.

This body of work endlessly revisits and reconstitutes the landscape of the DMZ - The Demilitarized Zone cutting across the Korean Peninsula that acts as a buffer zone between North and South Korea. Reworking fragments of terrain, blocks of land and water, Lee creates a world functioning according to the logic of its own terms. In this sense, it is a world that is entirely hermetic - appropriately so, considering that the territory Lee depicts is defined by the very impregnability of its borders. Creativ Europe

Fons Scheidon is one of those unique voices that comes jetting down from the mesosphere every so often with a project that could only come from his delightfully odd mind. For his latest gig, a music video for Voicst’s “Feel Like a Rocket,” Fons teamed up with some of the same crew that worked on the MTV Asia MobSquad series, including the bad-ass character animators at Brazilian studio Birdo. Motionographer